I wasn’t sure about the first sentence as I wanted to say “during the Summer, some time in August” but that does not really work the same way in Norwegian. Adding a few commas and changing it to “en helg i August” works in this case.

Similarly in English, adding veldig before every adjective in a sentence is a little bit “over-emphasising”, so the latter one(s) can be skipped

kjempe morsomt – this is one of those joining up word scenarios! Quite often with kjempe followed by an adjective, the words can be joined – in this case kjempemorsomt

One last error, and it’s a bit of a noob mistake as we were doing so well… we are talking about a definitive collection of aircraft “de hurtige…” so we must add “ene” to form de hurtigeflyene

During the Summer in England, one weekend in August,
there is a very big, fine show/arrangement called "RIAT".
When we lived in England, we always tried to visit it because
it was really fun to see all the fast planes that came
from many countries :o)

9 Comments so far

I think you might be right, but none of “the Norwegians” commented so maybe it “sounded” ok when they read it?

Will give one of them a nudge to answer that one for sure. I also thought that generally “når” is a future or question word and “da” is a “past reference” word, so in this case “da” would seem to fit better…

At school we were thought “Den gang da og hver gang når” (That time when and everytime when – or something like that…)

If it is something that happens repeatedly, you use når, and if it happens once you use da. So it would be Da vi bodde i England. An example of når would be “Når vi går på skolen om morgenen” (when we go to school in the morning), because it happens more than once. Guess it’s true that we use Da in in the past and Når in the future too. Never thought about that.

You are right thoug Russ, sometimes it is hard to know whether da or når should be used. You will find that in a lot of cases, Norwegians would struggle with what to use too, which is probably why nobody has commented on it here. I have to admit I didn’t see it when I read through it the first time.

I’m gonna struggle to explain the grammar… But it is either “alle hurtigflyene” (without e), or “alle de hurtige flyene” (in two words). Alle hurtigflyene means you are talking about all fast planes in general, whilst alle de hurtige flyene means you’re more precise about which planes.

Oh, by the way – if you are reading this because you subscribe to the Symfony project blog, sorry! My settings were to add a “symfony” category by default to every post, and I forgot to change this one… oops!